The Bride of Texas, page 18
Three months later old man Houska remembered his gift, but had no plans to go to Wilber, and because he knew the saloonkeeper to be an upstanding citizen he decided to wait and pick up the bottle next time he had reason to be in town. This happened a week later when he went in for a new batch of beer. He drove the cart in for that, but once more forgot about his trophy because the session with the foursome of Wilber neighbours repeated itself with an even less sober outcome.
For the next two months he had no cause to make another trip to Wilber, and then, when he did, he had to send Vojta, because he got a severe case of lumbago. He was reluctant to subject a minor like Vojta to the temptation of the forgotten bottle, because until Doc Paddock had made his diagnosis, the lad had been well on his way to becoming a drunkard. Finally, after another two months, the opportunity arose. Old Auntie Vejlupka’s daughter was getting married, the one from Spider Web near Wilber, and Dad Houska remembered the bottle and, to keep it in sight, placed it in the centre of the table where another gathering of the foursome was taking place. Towards morning, he finally succeeded in getting it home.
At home, Doc Paddock’s warning did its work: like a hungry cat Vincek stalked the kitchen cabinet where the whisky stood on the top shelf, without touching the forbidden beverage. But the bottle possessed a strange power that drew Vincek closer and closer on his rounds. The circle tightened, until one evening Cousin Martin appeared unexpectedly, along with his very old father, on the way to Wilber from the distant town of Cuba in Dakota, and they needed a place to stay the night. That called for a celebration — they hadn’t seen one another for more than three months — but, true to Doc Paddock’s advice, they started with beer. Then Martin’s father, who had never in his life needed a doctor, expressed the desire for something a little sharper. The circle tightened down into a point without dimensions and the bottle, twice forgotten and once denied, found its way to the kitchen table. Vincek poured a generous measure for his ancient uncle, Martin, Vojta, and his dad, and then for his two younger brothers, and what was left (quite a bit) he poured himself. The old uncle held up the glass and smacked his lips. “Quality whisky,” he remarked knowingly, “leaves a film on the glass. Here’s to you!” Vincek felt bad, but he couldn’t insult his relative. They all emptied their glasses in one gulp and they all got sick.
“From that day forward,” said Houska, “I don’t think Vincek has touched a drop of whisky, Dad is sworn to stay dry, and so was I, before I enlisted. Here it doesn’t make much sense to look after your health, since you’re always risking your neck anyway.”
All that was left of the campfire was a few glowing coals. Kakuska, with his castiron stomach, was roasting the last two sausages over them.
It was raining in Amsterdam. The Hotel Savoy faced onto a small square, its paving-stones set alight by the brilliance of the large café in the nearby Grand Hotel. Kapsa still had well over half of Hanzlitschek’s gulden left. In an upstairs room, a candle in a pewter candlestick on the commode shed its light on a framed alpine landscape with the sun setting behind a snow-capped peak.
The rain poured down. Beyond the wall of rain — unseen, but Kapsa could feel its presence — was the sea. In the opposite direction, to the south and east, night had descended over Germany and Austria. He knew he would never go back. Ursula was there, but she had never been even a possibility. In her he had had a brief glimpse of a beautiful life, a green oasis, an island in the grey ocean of his existence.
He was terrified for her but there was nothing he could do. And he still had more than half of Hanzlitschek’s gulden left.
In the rainy Amsterdam night, his choice was clear. Tomorrow a travel agent, a ticket, a boat, America.
He went downstairs to the dining room. The hotel had an imposing name, but it was small, no more than a refuge for the modest traveller whose means did not extend to the porter’s services at the Grand Hotel.
He sat down at the bar and, because his money couldn’t buy what he really wanted, he ordered a whole bottle of brandy, to help him forget the grey ocean, until only the green island with Ursula remained.
Then he heard the sound of someone speaking his mother tongue.
It scared him.
He couldn’t make out the words. It wasn’t the language of his paradise — no, that was German, so hated, so loved (“Ach, du lieber Mann! Mein Liebster! You know, don’t you! Or are you that dumb? Do I have to tell you? You barely understand German, mein Liebster!”) That was the gentle tongue of Ursula von Hanzlitschek. Home was no paradise, but in the language of his homeland he was at home. Seven men sat at a corner table, the oldest not quite thirty, as far as he could tell through the dense cloud of cigar smoke that enveloped them. They were puffing on huge cheroots with gold bands around them, which contrasted with their threadbare clothes. There was one exception. His cheroot set off an aristocratic face with an aquiline nose. He wore a new suit of Irish tweed, and it was his voice that led the conversation. In front of him on the table sat a box of cigars and two bottles of brandy.
The words were clearer now: “… nsky has a brickyard in New York. He needs fellows who don’t have two left hands.…”
Kapsa took his bottle from the table and his derby from the back of his chair, and walked over.
“Fellow countrymen?” he asked.
The sound of their mother tongue startled them, and seven pairs of suspicious eyes peered at him from behind a smokescreen. They saw the tell-tale derby and were frightened.
Then one of them said, “Kapsa, is that you?” An echo from the not too distant past. Not a city face, but one he had last seen under the two brass apples on an Austrian cap.
“Salek?”
“That’s me! What the devil are you doing here?”
And what the devil are you doing, Kapsa thought. Last time he’d seen Salek had been in Prague, when Windischgraetz was blasting the barricades with his cannon. Kapsa’s unit had been marching past the battery towards their attack position and, in the heightened awareness that the tension of battle brings, he had taken in the image of a huge man from his neighbouring village, a blackened muzzle-loader in his hand, urgently ramming a ball down the barrel. That was Salek. He glanced around the table. Kapsa could imagine little brass apples twinkling over each of the country faces, except for the man in the tweed suit.
“Probably the same as you, Ondra.”
He sat down and listened to their simple stories. They had all deserted together from Mohuc, an Austro-German garrison, where they were members of Klevenheuller’s Thirty-fifth Pilsen regiment, which had joined to it nine artillery companies from the First Prague Regiment. All of them, that is, but the sharp-nosed man in tweed, who said he was from General Hartmann’s artillery but wasn’t a gunner, something he needn’t have added because Kapsa could see that he didn’t have a gunner’s hands. What were they — a priest’s hands? He held his cheroot in a silver cigar-holder with an ivory snake curled around it. Was he a chaplain? Why would an Austrian chaplain desert from an army in which chaplains were second only to God and the emperor? Perhaps this chaplain had another von Hanzlitschek at the beginning of his story, and another — but no, there was only one Ursula.
There were short, simple tales about endless soldiering, about misery that became unbearable following the débâcle at the Prague barricades in ’48. There were reports of misery at home. Havlicek was forbidden to publish his newspaper. A slight man from Nymburk told them the jails had swallowed up hundreds of patriots now that this swine Bach was at the helm in Austria. They were on their way to America. They even had work waiting there for them.
Kapsa placed his bottle on the table beside the two others, and he saw the man with the aquiline nose — who could have been some retired lieutenant — eye the bottle and then Kapsa’s face.
“That’s true,” he said. “Four years before we took off, before ’48, Touzimsky left the Mohuc garrison all by himself. Well, he wasn’t alone — he took the regimental strong-box with him. Now he owns a brickworks in Brooklyn.”
The men around the table chuckled.
“Help yourselves,” said Kapsa, pointing to his bottle.
“And you, have a cigar,” said the retired lieutenant emeritus — or was it chaplain? — and he pushed the box in his direction, then took a puff on his own cigar in its silver holder with the ivory snake.
“He sounds like a crafty devil,” remarked Kapsa.
“Touzimsky? I know what you mean,” said the lieutenant-chaplain. “But he’s a patriot all the same.”
Kapsa lit a cigar. “Is that so?” The cigar reminded him of von Hanzlitschek, and he set it aside on the ashtray. “You say he left before ’48?”
“Why not? America was there long before ’48. He didn’t need a kick in the butt from General Windischgraetz, the way we did.”
“All he needed was a chance at the regimental cash-box.”
The lieutenant looked at the bottle again, as though there was some significance to it, Kapsa felt. “Right, that was all he needed.”
They were silent, then one of the six said, “He only hires Czechs to work for him in the brickworks. We’re all sure of a job.”
“And he’s looking for Czech investors,” said the lieutenant. “He’s expanding.” He took a sip of his drink and looked at Kapsa’s bottle again.
Later, the two of them were left alone. The lieutenant was staying at the same hotel as Kapsa, while the others were lodged in a doss-house down by the harbour. “Where did you take off from?” the lieutenant asked.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll keep that to myself.”
Another glance at the bottle. “I won’t press you. You must have had good reason.”
“We all did.”
“It’s all in how you look at it,” the lieutenant said, pulling a gold watch out of his tweed vest. “Those fellows” — he gave a toss of his head towards the door — “it was misery for them. Life is tough in the Austrian army these days, and will be for a long time yet. Hard outside the army, too. And even if it weren’t, when they finally finish their service and go home, their sweethearts will have married the clever ones, the ones who could afford to bribe the crimps and avoid conscription. And what do these men have to look forward to? Drudgery, my friend. Drudgery and the hope that, if they work extra hard, they’ll live until they die. Do you think any of them comes from an estate?”
“I’m a smallholder too,” said Kapsa. “That’s why I was in uniform.”
“Why aren’t you still in uniform?” The eyes — were they a priest’s eyes? — looked right through him. “Because you didn’t want to go back to the farm? Because you got the urge to go to America?”
Kapsa said nothing. A suspicion was taking root in his mind. What if he, or all of them, had fallen into a trap? What if the tweed coat was just like the derby, a disguise? He shivered. But this was Holland, after all —
“I’ll tell you how it is with you, my friend,” said the retired lieutenant, sticking a fresh cheroot in the silver cigar-holder with the ivory snake creeping around it. “You can’t go back to the farm now!”
When the mail arrived, the sergeant was standing guard by the general’s tent, staring out at the Vicksburg palisades. The city towered over the broad river like a fiery triangle. They couldn’t seem to conquer it. Lieutenant Williams walked out of the tent.
“Sergeant,” he said, “are you Bohemian?”
“Yes, I’m Czech, sir.”
“The general wants to see you.”
Inside the tent, his general was sitting at a camp table, puffing on a cigar. He raised his eyes to the sergeant, eyes that were clear and bright even through the smoke that hung in the air. He repeated Lieutenant Williams’s question. The sergeant repeated his reply.
“There are quite a few of you Czechs in the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin, aren’t there?” asked the general. The question caught the sergeant off guard. The general was looking at a letter that appeared to be from a parish registry office, but he couldn’t tell which one — the letter was upside-down. The general studied the letter. “Do you know a vivandière who calls herself — Busty Betsy?”
“I think.…” The sergeant tried to recall if any of the camp women went by that name, maybe even a Czech, but he couldn’t. “I think I don’t, sir.”
“But of course you do know there are women like that in camp.”
“Of course,” the sergeant admitted, “Easy Lizzie, Bubbly Babsy, Hot Bottom Lynn.…”
“I’m not looking for a list,” the general interrupted. “I just need to know if there’s such a person as Busty Betsy.”
“I can’t help you with that one, sir. But I will check.”
The general exhaled and went back to the letter. They could hear the tinkle of tin cups as a platoon marched by. “Soldiers will always surprise you,” the general said. “Let me read you something.” He laid aside the letter from the parish. Beneath it lay another letter, on pink paper, with a picture of Cupid holding a bow and arrow — part of a folder that Corporal Gambetta sold to soldiers who wanted to write love letters. Cupid’s arrow, made of yellow metal, could be removed from his bow and stuck into the heart embossed on the other half of the folder. The recipient was supposed to write an answer on this half, tear it off, and return it to the archer. The general read: “ ‘Each evening, dear brother, I whisper to my sweetheart — a kind and lovely nurse who ministers to the ill and the afflicted in the regimental dispensary: Behold thou art fair’ ” — the general looked briefly at the sergeant — “ ‘Busty Betsy, ah, how fair — ’ ” As the general read on, the intriguing nickname popped up again and again, while the sergeant wondered furiously who it could be. “ ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, Busty Betsy, which feed among the lilies’— well,” said the general, putting the letter down, “I don’t have to continue, do I? I assume you recognize the passage. You’re a Christian, are you not?”
The sergeant shook his head, wondering what the consequences of admitting the truth would be. “I used to be a Catholic. Now I call myself a free-thinker. I’m a theist, sir.”
“Have you been to college?”
“No, but I’ve read a lot. And I know the passage.”
“Even if you’re not a Christian, will you agree with me that there’s a fine bit of blasphemy here, when you consider that this is a Christian army, in name at least? And when you consider what it is we’re fighting for? It’s one thing to get mixed up with a Busty Betsy, and even to blow off a little about it to your comrades, but it’s quite another thing to write such improprieties in a letter to your brother” — he perused the covering letter from the parish office, and the sergeant could feel an impending calamity — “especially,” the general went on, having found what he was looking for, “when the brother is only eight years old.”
He put the letter down and looked the sergeant in the eye. “I can’t just ignore this,” he said ominously. “The child couldn’t make head or tail of the letter, so he showed it to an older sister. She translated it for the parents and they took it to their priest and asked him to give the writer a good talking-to. The priest, in turn, has asked me to do it for him. Shall I read you what he wrote?”
“You don’t have to,” replied the sergeant hoarsely.
“Do you know a private in the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin by the name of” — the general peered at the priest’s letter, and then spelled out, “V-o-j-t-e-c-h How-ska? He’s a fellow countryman of yours in K Company.”
“It wasn’t him!” blurted the sergeant. He stopped himself, but under the general’s glare his principles dissolved and he gave voice to his suspicions.
In fifteen minutes, Shake, the pale practical joker, stood in front of the general, swearing up and down that he hadn’t known how young Vojta’s brother was. The general didn’t believe him and, although he was normally quite succinct, this time he delivered a lengthy lecture on the corrupting of innocents. An hour later, Shake was marching around the camp wearing a barrel around his waist with a sign that said, “I AM A LIAR.”
He had admitted to the general that he had invented Busty Betsy.
The general didn’t bother to summon Houska, and the sergeant was relieved. Perhaps Vojta would remain happily ignorant of what had happened. But then — letters! The garrulous parents would send letters. Sharing it with the priest wouldn’t be enough. True, they didn’t know how to write, but what are sons for?
As long as his sweetheart didn’t write! But surely the parents wouldn’t have told her.
A few days later, he ran into Houska sitting in front of his tent with a letter in his hand, scowling and shaking his head.
“What’s the news from home, Vojta?”
“I can’t figure it out,” said the private from Wisconsin. “Ma’s preaching to me like a priest. She says I should stay away from easy women and wash in cold water. And not put pepper or spices on my meat —” Houska raised his sad eyes from the page. “As if we had spices in the army!”
“Does your ma mention any easy woman in particular?”
“No,” said Houska. “I’d give a lot to know what’s eating her. After all, I’m engaged.”
You’re in dreamland again, the sergeant thought, but out loud he said, “You know mothers, they worry.”
So much for the home front. Now the sweetheart.
A week later more mail arrived. Houska was again sitting in front of the tent with a letter, this time looking like a farmer whose barn had just burned down.
“Something wrong, Vojta?”
“Read it,” said Houska gloomily.
It contained a single sentence, written in the copperplate calligraphy of someone who had gone to a one-room school but no further: “Vojta I had no idea you are such a swine goodbye for ever I am marrying fredy houzvicka from cedar rapits your not for never more Rosie.”
“I can’t understand —” Houska sat there like an undertaker. “Sarge, did I get drunk and do something I don’t remember? But how could anyone not remember something like that?” He thought a moment, then added angrily, “And what bastard would have written her about it if I did?”
